Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

“I almost laughed. It was impossible. Ridiculous. So cruel. I didn’t scream. I waited, scanning the water, ready to lunge in and save Charlie’s dad if I could only see him. But there was nothing. No trace. I sat down and stared at the horizon and didn’t weep. It seemed perfectly possible that I might freeze to death right there, complete the event. I even opened the throat of my dress, thinking of the Kendall boys shedding their coats that first day. That’s what I was doing when Charlie crawled out of the water.”

Selkirk stood up. “But you said—”

“He’d lost his hat. And his coat had come open. He crawled right up the beach, sidewise, like a crab. Just the way he had down the rigging. Of course, my arms opened to him, and the cold dove down my dress. I was laughing, Mr Selkirk. Weeping and laughing and cooing, and his head swung up, and I saw.”

With a single, determined wriggle of her shoulders, Mrs Marchant went completely still. She didn’t speak again for several minutes. Helpless, Selkirk sat back down.

“The only question I had in the end, Mr Selkirk, was when it had happened.”

For no reason he could name, Selkirk experienced a flash of Amalia’s cruel, haunted face, and tried for the thousandth time to imagine where she’d gone. Then he thought of the dead town behind him, the debris disappearing piece by piece and bone by bone into the dunes, his aunt’s silent death. His uncle. He’d never made any effort to determine what had happened to his uncle after Amalia vanished.

“I still think about those boys, you know,” Mrs Marchant murmured. “Every day. The one suspended in the ropes, exposed like that, all torn up. And the one that disappeared. Do you think he jumped to get away, Mr Selkirk? I think he might have. I would have.”

“What on earth are you—?”

“Even the dead’s eyes reflect light,” she said, turning her bright and living ones on him. “Did you know that? But Charlie’s eyes . . . Of course, it wasn’t really Charlie, but . . .”

Selkirk almost leapt to his feet again, wanted to, wished he could hurtle downstairs, flee into the dusk. And simultaneously he found that he couldn’t.

“What do you mean?”

For answer, Mrs Marchant cocked her head at him, and the ghost of her smile hovered over her mouth and evaporated. “What do I mean? How do I know? Was it a ghost? Do you know how many hundreds of sailors have died within five miles of this point? Surely one or two of them might have been angry about it.”

“Are you actually saying—?”

“Or maybe that’s silly. Maybe ghosts are like gods, no? Familiar faces we have clamped on what comes for us? Maybe it was the sea. I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that there was no Charlie in the face before me, Mr Selkirk. None. I had no doubt. No question. My only hope was that whatever it was had come for him after he was gone, the way a hermit crab climbs inside a shell. Please God, whatever that is, let it be the wind and the cold that took him.”

Staggering upright, Selkirk shook his head. “You said he was dead.”

“So he was.”

“You were mistaken.”

“It killed the Kendall boy, Mr Selkirk. It crawled down and tore him to shreds. I’m fairly certain it killed its own father as well. Charlie’s father, I mean. Luis took one look at him and vanished into the dunes. I never saw the dog again.”

“Of course it was him. You’re not yourself, Mrs Marchant. All these years alone . . . It spared you, didn’t it? Didn’t he?”

Mrs Marchant smiled one more time and broke down weeping, silently. “It had just eaten,” she whispered. “Or whatever it is it does. Or maybe I had just lost my last loved ones, and stank of the sea, and appeared as dead to it as it did to me.”

“Listen to me,” Selkirk said, and on impulse he dropped to one knee and took her hands once more. God, but they were cold. So many years in this cold, with this weight on her shoulders. “That day was so full of tragedy. Whatever you think you . . .”

Very slowly, Selkirk stopped. His mind retreated down the stairs, out the lighthouse door to the mainland, over the disappearing path he’d walked between the dunes, and all the way back into Winsett. He saw anew the shuttered boarding houses and empty taverns, the grim smile of the stable-boy. He saw the street where his uncle’s cabin had been. What had happened to his uncle? His aunt? Amalia ? Where had they all gone? Just how long had it taken Winsett to die? His mind scrambled farther, out of town, up the track he had taken, between the discarded pots and decaying whale-bones toward the other silent, deserted towns all along this blasted section of the Cape.

“Mrs Marchant,” he whispered, his hands tightening around hers, having finally understood why she had stayed. “Mrs Marchant, please. Where is Charlie now?”

She stood, then, and twined one gentle finger through the tops of his curls as she wiped at her tears. The gesture felt dispassionate, almost maternal, something a mother might do to a son who has just awoken. He looked up and found her gazing again not out to sea but over the dunes at the dark streaming inland.

“It’s going to get even colder,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

KIM NEWMAN

The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train

KIM NEWMAN IS A NOVELIST, critic and broadcaster. His published fiction includes The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago , the Anno Dracula novels and stories, The Quorum, The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories, Dead Travel Fast, Life’s Lottery, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), Where the Bodies Are Buried, Doctor Who: Time and Relative, The Man from the Diogenes Club and Secret Files of the Diogenes Club under his own name, and The Vampire Genevieve and Orgy of the Blood Parasites as “Jack Yeovil”.

His non-fiction books include Nightmare Movies, Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Neil Gaiman), Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Stephen Jones), Wild West Movies, The BFI Companion to Horror, Millennium Movies and BFI Classics studies of Cat People and Doctor Who .

He is a contributing editor to Sight & Sound and Empire magazines and has written and broadcast widely on a range of topics. His short story “Week Woman” was adapted for the TV series The Hunger and he has directed and written a tiny short film, Missing Girl .

Newman has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Critics Award, the British Science Fiction Award and the British Fantasy Award. He was born in Brixton (London), grew up in the West Country, went to University near Brighton and now lives in Islington (London).

As the author reveals: “ ‘The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train’ was written for my collection The Man from the Diogenes Club – mostly to fill in background for Richard Jeperson, the hero of those stories (while keeping a few mysteries back for later).

“Also, I happen to like stories set on trains and wanted to do one. I dimly remember being taken with a British TV Sexton Blake serial in the 1960s set on a train, and I make a connection here with Terror by Night , a 1946 Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film that follows a similar route.

“In Throw Momma from the Train , Billy Crystal’s character claims ‘Every great mystery or romance has a train in it somewhere’.”

Culler’s Halt